Women in the Valley of the Kings

 I could conceivably write and finish this review in these last few days of April.  To my own great disappointment, I have only managed to read two books this month.   Unfortunately, I suspect that I may only read one book in May though.  My current read is a thick volume.

 I downloaded Women in the Valley of the Kings from Net Galley.  They gave me 48 hours to download it, but I did that right away.  The last book I reviewed on this blog that came from Net Galley dates back to a year ago.     

                                       

Sheppard tells us that European and American archaeologists in Egypt took their valuable artifacts home to protect them from the local Arab population who they considered "savages".  

I met one Arab on my college campus.  It felt like an occasion of importance for both of us, so we decided to have a dialogue on social issues.  I don't remember the specifics of what we said, but we parted on good terms.  We called each other "cousin" as descendants of the biblical Abraham.  I never saw him again.  This is still my only in person encounter with an Arab.  

When I looked through my books on Goodreads,  I got through four pages of entries before finding a book by Arab author Raja'a Alem . The link is to Alem's Wikipedia page.  She is a Saudi Arabian writer who won the Arabic Booker Prize in 2011 for her book The Dove's Necklace.  I reviewed The Dove's Necklace on this blog here.  I wasn't aware that it had won an award when I read and reviewed it.  It seems to me that my exposure to books by Arabs has been pretty limited.  I do feel that I need to remedy this situation.

Getting back to Women in the Valley of the Kings, I discovered through this book that two American millionaires in Egypt had fled the U.S. to avoid prosecution.  They were both members of the Tweed Ring headed by Boss Tweed.   I don't intend to get into the weeds of this scandal in this review, but I do find it interesting that Egypt ended up being a refuge for wealthy American criminals during the late 19th century.  They vandalized and pillaged Egypt.  Yet this was called a  "Golden Age" of Egyptian archaeology.

Early archaeology hadn't been careful.  I had read before about Heinrich Schliemann destroying layers at his Turkish archaeological site in the 1860's and 70's in order to find ancient Troy.  Gaston Maspero, the director of the Department of Antiquities,  refused Schliemann permission to do any further excavation.

Amelia Edwards had published a bestselling memoir about her travels in Egypt, and used her earnings to fund archaeology through founding the Egypt Exploration Fund.   She sponsored Matthew Flinders Petrie who had measured and surveyed the pyramids on the Giza plateau.  He was a careful man who lived frugally, and expected those who assisted him to do the same.

There were public unwrappings of mummies in London to learn the identities and genders of the remains. There were also letters to The Manchester Guardian in opposition to these public mummy unwrappings.

Author Sheppard believed that the more people learned about ancient Egypt through public unwrappings, the more money would be available for museums with Egyptology exhibits, for university Egyptology programs and for organizations like the Manchester Egyptian Association.

Margaret Murray, who trained Egyptologists, was also involved in the cause of women's suffrage.  She was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded by the Pankhursts to promote women's suffrage in 1903.  Margaret Murray spoke to the WSPU in 1910.  Suffrage was granted to all women in the UK in 1928.

Myrtle Broome was an artist who copied the art on Egyptian tomb walls.  Her first artwork involved decorating the walls of her new family house.  She designed the mantlepiece and the textiles that decorated it.  Myrtle was also one of the original students of Margaret Murray.  Myrtle's first trip to Egypt was in 1927 when Flinders Petrie asked her to come to Kau el Kebir to copy the art in the Middle Kingdom tombs that Petrie and his team had excavated several years previously.  The tombs were now  exposed  and the art was deteriorating.  The art needed to be copied before it was destroyed.

In the 1920's, the only ways to preserve the art without destroying it in the process were photography or hand copying.  Yet there was no color photography.  So photography was limited to black and white which wasn't an accurate depiction of the art.  That left hand copying as the only true reproduction of the artwork.

An Egyptian police chief named El Gorzawy was courting Myrtle.  She stayed at his police outpost.  He gave large dinners in Myrtle's honor and introduced her to the leaders of the community. Myrtle liked him, but she didn't think she could marry a man who wasn't English.  Since no reason was given for this attitude, I can only conclude that she was prejudiced against Egyptians.  I'm sure that such a prejudice would have been considered praiseworthy among the English of her era.  If she had been willing to marry El Gorzawy, that would have been considered shocking to other English people in Egypt at the time.

Myrtle was close to Margaret Murray and the Petries.  So she thought she could get work in Egypt.  She found a position with Amice Calverley in Abydos. Myrtle hadn't known Amice previously.  Amice had grown up in South Africa where her father served with the army.  Then they moved to Canada where Amice attended the Slade School of Fine Art.  She also learned to play piano and won a scholarship at the Royal College of Music.  She wrote an opera, but it was never performed.  She then worked at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology which was the first British public museum.

 In 1926 Amice met Leonard Wooley, the archaeologist.  He was excavating Ur and Amarna.  He persuaded her to become an archaeological artist.  Since her opera had failed, she decided to follow his advice.  She worked with archaeologist Aylward M. Blackman at the Temple of Seti I at Abydos.  He needed an artist to copy the art which was deteriorating.  The temple was L shaped and built by Ramses II during the 19th dynasty.  There were seven chapels honoring Seti I, Ptah, Re-Horakhty, Amun-Re, Osiris, Isis and Horus.  Each chapel showed Seti I offering to the God honored there. In return he received life, dominion and the royal insignia.  This means to me that it is the Gods who make him a King.  The priests performed a ritual that transformed Seti I into Osiris.  The temple had a list of the ancestors of Seti I and the Abydos King list.  Egyptologists noticed who was left off the lists and was therefore not worthy of being remembered.

There was a building called the Osireion located behind the temple.  Margaret Murray excavated it in 1902-3.  The Egyptian Exploration Society hired Herbert Felton who was both an engineer and a photographer in 1925.  He photographed the Osireion, but the light was terrible in the temples which made for bad photos.  So they hired Amice Calverley to draw the art.  She placed drawing paper on top of the photo.  After she finished the tracings in Oxford, they were taken back to Egypt to be completed in the temple in front of the original art.  Then experts were called in to check the drawings.  Since there had been deterioration of the wall art, the drawings also had to be incomplete.  The incomplete sections were noted with hash marks.  Amice's work was considered particularly good and she was to continue working at Abydos full time starting in January 1928.  She continued to do well and was hired for an additional season.  She went alone for that season, so she also had to run the camp.

That season Egyptologist James Breasted arrived with patron John D. Rockefeller Jr. who was still one of the wealthiest people in history.  His father, John D. Rockefeller was the owner of Standard Oil. Rockefeller was impressed by Amice's drawing ability.  He contributed what would be the equivalent of  $1.2 million today.  Amice was now able to hire to pay another copyist full time.  Mary Jonas warned Amice against taking too much American money.  Mary Jonas wanted it "to be a British undertaking".  When Amice died she received a four page obituary in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, but it's important to note that Amice's cousin wrote the obituary.

I think that Egyptian artifacts should always have belonged to the Egyptians.  Shouldn't Egyptians have been the ones to study those artifacts?  It was their history.  How would the British and French have liked it if  Egyptians had come to Britain and France to engage in archaeology, and claimed the British and French artifacts they dug up as theirs?  

 Sheppard tells us that Egypt was given "nominal independence" in 1919.  I learned from running a search on "Egypt 1919" that this wasn't an accurate characterization of events.  Egypt revolted against English colonial rule in 1919.  It wasn't until 1922 that the UK recognized Egypt's independence. 

The English colonizer perspective dominated this book. I am not a fan of that attitude.  When I looked at archaeology from the Egyptian perspective, I realized that British archaeologists were stealing their history.  I also realized that all archaeology during this period was theft by people from colonizing powers.  Since the author is British, she doesn't recognize that she was writing about theft, but Egyptians surely must have realized it.  This would have been one of the many reasons why they kicked the British out of their country.  I have been radicalized by looking at this book from the Egyptian perspective.